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230 SNAKES IN SUITS
of the interviewers in a room together for a discussion of the candidates,
the selection committee can flush out these discrepancies. By
reviewing the candidate’s interview results together, critical inconsistencies,
and possibly deceitful claims, can be uncovered. A good
meeting facilitator will get each person to test his or her impressions,
feelings, and facts about each candidate. Lists of positive and negative
aspects of the slate of candidates can then be used to make the
final selection.
Adding interviewers to the schedule is time consuming and expensive
and is not often done when the open position is a lower-level
one. As a result, these candidates will get less thorough treatment by
fewer people, including, perhaps, lower-level interviewers who may
not have sufficient training and experience. This situation also arises
when candidates just out of college are interviewed with little experience
to validate, save their academic performance, course work,
and college extracurricular experiences. Such individuals, if they are
psychopaths, could cause a lot of problems down the road if they
slip past the company’s defenses because they were not evaluated
sufficiently.
B-Scan
We analyzed the succession plans of a few hundred North
American executives and noted that the similarities between
the developmental issues for some managers identified as “high
potentials” and psychopathic-like features were startling. Our
list of questionable characteristics—dysfunctional behaviors,
attitudes, and judgments—was refined to form the B-Scan, a research
instrument for use by companies as part of their evaluation
for succession planning.
We obtained clear differences between a group of successful,
high-performing executives and a group of convicted
white-collar or economic criminals (that is, individuals who defrauded
their companies and other innocent victims). In a follow-up